Greenwald: ‘the objective of the NSA is literally the elimination of global privacy’

The objective of the United States National Security Agency is to eliminate privacy around the world, the American writer who helped expose the NSA’s far-reaching surveillance powers said on Tuesday.
Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian answered questions about the
ongoing NSA leaks and his source, the now notorious former
intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, during an online
question-and-answer session held Tuesday on the website Reddit.

Greenwald is among the pool of writers who have analyzed and
reported on leaks attributed to Snowden since unauthorized
disclosures first surfaced in June of this year detailing the
otherwise largely unknown operations of the US intelligence
community.

Since then, Snowden’s documents have shown how the US government
collects phone records for millions of Americans,
compiles the Internet habits of innocent citizens and an array of
other activity that has caused international backlash abroad and
prompted lawmakers in the States to propose legislation aimed at
reforming the NSA.

Nearly four months after those leaks began, Greenwald told Reddit
on Tuesday that he believes in his opinion that people around the
world now have “a basic idea of the objective of the NSA: to
eliminate privacy worldwide, literally, by ensuring that every
human electronic communication is subject to being collected,
stored, analyzed and monitored by the NSA and its allies.”